How Lilly Gilded Prozac's Profile

Sleepy Watchdog

Sen. Charles Grassley, a powerful Republican from Iowa, has challenged the FDA's handling of SSRI issues in particular. Just after a major FDA hearing last year, Grassley launched an investigation of the agency for allegedly concealing risks associated with the drugs.

Healy, on his own, volunteered some details about the matter when submitting testimony for the recent U.K. investigation. Ten days before the FDA hearing, he said, three noted psychiatrists -- who authored most of the trial literature on SSRIs -- came forth and declared that the drugs were "safe and effective and well-tolerated by children," even though they had never seen the raw data on which their findings were supposedly based. But despite this "pre-emptive strike," Healy noted, the FDA did go on to demand stronger warning labels for childhood use of the drugs.

By then, however, the drugs had already soared in popularity. A government study published last year showed that children who visited the doctor for depression symptoms were nearly three times as likely to wind up on prescription drugs (usually the newer SSRIs) than they were a decade ago. Moreover, it indicated that adults -- including 13% of women aged 45 to 64 -- were turning to the drugs as well.

Healy has pointed to drugmakers, which spend far more promoting their products than they do developing them, as the drivers behind that trend.

"Corporations work out what they have to sell and then prepare the market so that we will want those products," he warned years ago. "It works for cars, oil and everything else. Why would it not work for psychiatry?"